Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas
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The deceptively vague inverted reference to Corneille is in truth an alteration that has profound bearing on the text. The die have been recast: there are significant shifts in meaning and tone between Corneille’s play and Brás Cubas’ memoir. Let us see why:
El Cid
He goes to her house
Two noble lovers
The summit of young passion
He kills her father
Honor animates and obsesses her
She wants to kill him, then die herself
Extreme tension in the dialogue
The dialogue turns towards the future
Posthumous Memoirs
She goes to his house
Two bourgeois ex-lovers
Twenty years later, already old
She was the involuntary cause of Brás
Cubas’ father’s death
Honor doesn’t affect them
He is about to die of pneumonia
The dialogue is good-natured
Importance of the past because there is
no future for either one of them
From a pair of Western tradition’s most passionate lovers is fashioned this pragmatic duo: Brás Cubas and Virgília. Average through and through, bourgeois, sated, and weary. Corneille has been appropriated and subverted and as parody becomes part of a Brazilian text of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Love and Ruins
Literary culture helps to shape Virgília as well. Metaphors straight out of French, literature define her character. In the beginning the narrator hedges:
Some nine or ten people had seen me leave, among them three ladies: my sister Sabina, married to Cotrim—their daughter, a lily of the valley … Be patient! In just a little while I’ll tell you who the third lady was. (Ch. I)
Still without a name, Virgília is soon beholden to French letters, for in his capacity as one beyond the pale of the living, the narrator allows himself a flight of fancy which invokes Chateaubriand:
And her imagination, like the storks that an illustrious traveler watched taking flight from the Ilissus on their way to African shores without the hindrance of ruins and times—that lady’s imagination also flew over the present rubble to the shores of a youthful Africa. (Ch. I)
The reader has no choice but to follow the narrator’s circuitous paths with skepticism; at every turn allusions abound as to his aesthetic preoccupations. In Chapter V, for instance, the metaphor distilled straight from Chateaubriand again illuminates the character of Virgília.
With that reflection I took leave of the woman, I won’t say the most discreet, but certainly the most beautiful among her contemporaries, the one whose imagination, like the storks on the Ilissus. (Ch. V)
In addition to the sympathetic rendering of Virgília’s beauty and her grief over the death of Brás Cubas, it should also be noted that there are constant references to the passage of time. Essentially time is the leit-motif of the work, from the disenchanted perspective of a narrator, who, from “the other side of the mystery” chronicles the ineluctable deterioration of people, monuments, and institutions. Thus the first mention of Virgília’s beauty is nullified by the comment Brás Cubas makes about her apparent decrepitude: “She was fifty-four then, she was a ruin, a splendid ruin …” (Ch. V).
Chateaubriand’s test (found in the Grecian voyage section in Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem) also refers to the disenchanted contemplation of ruins. After having visited, the Athenian temples, testimony to humanity’s past, the French writer entwines observations on culture, transitory and mutable, and nature, permanent and immutable, represented by the eternally youthful storks. The French text prepares the way for a return to the past, a search for youth. Virgília is imagined young, as Brás Cubas remembers her. Yet her youthful beauty is invoked precisely to underscore the “splendid ruin” she, as well as Brás Cubas, has become.
In the context of Chateaubriand’s protagonists/ruins, the opening quote from Corneille gains in meaning. It serves simultaneously to minimize and discount conflict and to emphasize—through textural differences such as Brás Cubas’ inversion of the quotes—the profound change wrought by the passage of time.
The Poetics of the Legacy
From his privileged position—both materially speaking and literally from beyond the grave—Brás Cubas ironically relates the struggle of a number of characters vying for inheritances, donations, and handouts. This occurs with Sabina, Quincas Borba, Dona Plácida, Dona Eusébia, and even the orator at the cemetery. Additionally, there is Virgília’s desire to inherit from Viegas, and the fact that the narrator’s own family “begins” with the fortune inherited by Luís Cubas.
Brás Cubas’ father wanted to “inherit” from the founder of the city of Santos the prestige associated with the name of the town. Thus the theme of what is handed down from one to another is played out again and again.
But the act of writing involves first and foremost memory, not only of existence itself, but of books and authors. To remember one’s lifetime is also to remember what one has read—the legacy of literature—goods that represent a major part of social commerce. There are essentially two types of transmission represented in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: texts and material goods. This is what makes up the poetics of the legacy, the integration of the socioeconomic sphere (which affords the characters sufficient leisure to cultivate the arts) and the cultural legacy that devolves from this leisure and which borrows liberally from foreign sources. In this manner plot and bill of lading are integrated into a harmonious whole.
Memory transforms and creates unconscious links as does the narrative. Through the alteration, inversion, and symbolic redeployment of foreign texts, the narrator constantly mediates between the raw material of existence and his writing. Filtered through the utterances of the “other,” the legacy and its several modes of remembering is a highly indirect and circuitous route toward the narrative. Plot may be dislocated, but everything is eventually redeemed by the act of writing, the moment when memory transforms itself into text.
The legacy is one of the narrative tricks to distance the reader from the text. Throughout the book we are observed by a narrator who sends us veiled messages by way of this or that quote. The last trick comes at the end: “I haven’t transmitted the legacy of our misery to any living creature.” In reality, however, the legacy expands beyond its mimetic limits to become a tribute paid to posterity: a novel.
The deceased narrator’s use of foreign texts is fascinating. It allows him to deploy his formidable arsenal of erudition and provides a contrast to the humdrum life described in the text. This juxtaposition is crucial because it unveils the relativism of the narrator. It establishes the framework for the play of ambiguity and contradiction and emphasizes the discrepancy between the minutiae of life and the great ideas and ideals embodied in some texts which he also questions with his humor.
The narrator’s own relationship to literature undergoes the same process: after an existence animated by literature and his subsequent transformation of reminiscence into a posthumous literary production, he dedicates his work to the worms, a paradox that can only be explained by his melancholy realization of the vanity of all existence. Nevertheless, it is literature that temporarily saves him from dissolution, transforming his work into a legacy for coming generations, and thus assuring the circulation of the written word.
A Strategic Vision of Brazilian Literature
The preceding examples illustrate Machado de Assis’ aim in his use of foreign literature: it has helped him depict a panorama in which cosmopolitan and local culture are mixed. As a man of his era, our author couldn’t help but be powerfully affected by foreign, and especially French culture. His oeuvre is a testament to the intense interest he had in France’s literary and political landscape. His work deserves to the made accessible on the stage of world literature the way French luminaries were made available in Portuguese.
Such an intercultural symbiosis is
not merely a result of Machado de Assis’ own vision of Brazilian culture. It also reflects the effort of Brazilian literature as a whole since the mid-1800s to reconcile the tension between the local and the universal.
Getting to know the slyly cosmopolitan Brás Cubas enhances our enjoyment of the European legacy, unifying and rationalizing theory and praxis. The new reader will be charmed by this mosaic, featuring not only a character of Imperial Brazil, but the process of his self-representation. The book combines critical vision and fictional dexterity, and is one of the greatest novels of Brazilian letters.
—Gilberto Pinheiro Passes
Translated by Barbara Jamison